Grace Hopper's inspiration.

craigb
Grace Hopper's inspiration.

Hedda's cousin?

craigb
Grace Hopper's inspiration.

She was a piece of work for sure.

BobF

craigb
Grace Hopper's inspiration.

She was a piece of work for sure.

Very common, but business oriented.

IF NEED-A-PROGRAMMER
    MOVE ADA-LOVELACE TO GRACE-HOPPER.

I did COBOL from 1977 to about 2010. The last 10 years was with a single client that paid a yearly retainer. In 2010 I did no work at all but was paid. They were bought up by another company and transitioned all IT to corporate.
 

bapu
MOVE ADA_LOVELACE TO GRACE_HOPPER.

A COBOL guy!
 
I once wrote a COBOL tool to replace standard card decks for a maintenance management system.
 
Does 3M ring a bell, craig?  IMMS?
 

BobF

bapu
MOVE ADA-LOVELACE TO GRACE-HOPPER.

A COBOL guy!
 
I once wrote a COBOL tool to replace standard card decks for a maintenance management system.
 
Does 3M ring a bell, craig?  IMMS?
 

I was a Fortran guy for a couple of years before becoming a COBOL guy.
 
First major bug I created in COBOL was due to a period on the wrong line in a IF statement. Learned that lesson quickly.

My language history:
 
Fortran, COBOL (4 different variants; HP,DEC,Sun and MicroFocus), Basic, Dbase III, HP Business Basic, FoxPro, Oracle Forms, Reports & Triggers/Procedures/Functions (PL/SQL), Oracles J2EE framework, some very light .net and finally PHP/Javascript.
 

If this was a game of COBOL one-upsmanship, I do believe I would win!  'Cause I think I am the ONLY geek in the world who has ever created a fully operational, full-screen editor coded entirely in...  COBOL!!!
 
Despite my many (obvious) objections, I had a programming manager that insisted I write a full-screen editor for our internal users in COBOL where we could allow or disallow certain features (the "real" issue with the DEC EVE and EDT editors we already had).  Yes, I ended up doing it and, yes, it DID work (albeit slow as snot).  No idea why he was so stuck on COBOL, probably THE worst language he could have picked for that task!
 
So many of the other programmers were laughing at my having to do the project that word got up to the VP of IT and, when he walked into one of the Team Leader's offices and saw a code printout of it being used as wallpaper (it WAS very pretty), he investigated and we went with my original suggestion (using EVE with available modifications).
 
I'm still a little glad that he saw it after I had it finished and working though! 
 
That said, I also programmed the fuzzy logic used to sync up cellular call records created by a single call as a user was handed off from tower to tower in COBOL.  There were two main issues:  One, we're talking about MILLIONS of call records (with over 2 BILLION in the Los Angeles area alone - the largest cellular market in the U.S.) and, two, the time stamps on all towers were always a little bit different.